Week 29: A diversion - the Great Australian dream of a big backyard (9-13 November, plus about 4 weekends leading up to then)

Week 29 – The great Australian dream of a big backyard.

Week 29 inside the house was a continuation of more tiling and more carpentry, so this is the week I will explain what is happening outside the house. All I really wanted in a new home was a backyard for the kids to play. 

The downside to building your home is that the site generally gets completely trashed, it is just mud and muck and builders rubble when you are handed the keys. I couldn’t imagine the feeling of arriving to our new home and the kids so excited about their back yard and just finding a mud puddle there (though I am sure my little grubs would love that too!).

We were very fortunate to have such an exceptional Site Supervisor that he let us have access to the site on the weekends to get the backyard landscaping done. This is such a blessing and opportunity, and one I am very grateful for. It has also been a pretty extraordinary challenge in logistics!

The process roughly looks like this:

•     Coming up with a garden design (as we didn’t require a landscaping plan for the complying development process)
•      Selecting and coordinating landscaper trades. Upon receiving the first three quotes I had a small moment of horror, then got creative finding young guys who are starting out to do the work at much more competitive rates, it just means I am more involved in the project management closely. As an upside, I am kept entertained by awesome dreadlocks and dance party music while he digs (bless Lachlan!), stories of diving with sharks (Tom-can-crete the concreter), hearing the dreams of a kid who always wanted to play with diggers (James Wheeler, great guy!). It brought youth and fun and humour to the process, lovely to work with guys who enjoy what they do.
•     Remove all the builders junk (unfortunately, the site cleaners only do the front yard, so this meant us cleaning up the junk mostly by hand!)
•     A big bobcat to get rough levels across the back yard and did out for the retaining walls on the high side (24/10)
•     A little baby digger to level the narrow walkway down the side of the house (where the washing lines and wheelie bins will reside).. (31/10)
•     Stump grinding the roots that were unveiled in the process – a stump a good 1.6m wide! (24/10)
•     Digging posts, then laying sleepers for retaining garden beds around the rear perimeter fenceline, and also building a cool bench seat around our tree that will double as a lovely sandpit for my little ones. (25/10, 31/10)
•     Importing (read, hours of barrowing!)  turf underlay/top soil that is nice sandy stuff our beautiful turf will love.(14/11, 21/11)

   And still to come in the next two weekends... 

•     Installing irrigation on a nifty timer system so it will stay watered (twice a day for 10 minutes!) when I am not on site, to ensure our baby grass grows up strong ready for when we move in (next weekend 28 Nov)
•     Planting 55 Lilly Pilly Resilience plants in the garden beds (next weekend 28 Nov)
•     Installing an awesome climbing frame and cubby house for the three little bears Christmas gift (next weekend 28 Nov).
•     Laying turf (the following weekend 5 Dec) 
•     Installing steps (5 December), which will later be tiled along with the alfresco in a nice travertine pavers by Super Jay (of the wall cladding fame… from 7 December)

Here are some progress photos over the last 5 weekends of work (roughly 1 weekend of excavation, 2 weekends of retaining wall gardens, 2 weekends of topsoil import and levelling), then there are two more to go until the back yard is complete.

 Site clean did not quite cover the back yard... so we had to clear this up by hand! It gave a nice opportunity for a 'before' shot of the yard! Quite a slope and a lot of rubble.

 The bobcat arrives. It was so fun to watch James playing robotics with his favourite machine. You could tell how much he loves this job, trained up by his Dad.

 A tight squeeze to get the Bobcat around the side with the scaffold in place!

 You remember that rotten old fence? He pulled the old thing down in about 2 minutes!

 Denver's first ever viewing of a truck at work....

 This is an excited face! Little boys and diggers - go figure!

 Our newly levelled yard - not such a slope now!

 Uncovered a massive stump from the old silky oak we removed - so much for it having been stump ground previously, it still measured 1.6m diameter! Gonski!

 Digging holes for the cemented posts for the retaining walls, which will discreetly hide this stormwater access too.

 Then came Peter on his much more maneuverable mini-digger. Just 900mm wide and able to cut and level the narrow side of the house (in about 40 very expensive minutes!)

 Lachlan's retaining wall posts with string laid out to carefully level them. They will function both as retaining wall and garden bed.

 Sleepers laid for the garden beds, just a matter of bolting them on.

Moving in 20 tonnes of turf underlay/top soil... on a day when we received about 30ml of rain! The poor guys were drenched!

 And the next weekend of another 10 tonnes of topsoil - flattened with a 150kg cement roller to a nice firm base, ready for turf to be laid. Tomorrow's job is to use those sleepers against the tree and transfrm them into a great sitting bench and sandpit inside.

 I love how much more level this is now!

More to come!